Persona (user experience)

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In user-centered design and marketing, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.

Description

Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments.

The term persona is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as pen portraits may also be used.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website.

Personas may also be used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), having been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.

User persona

A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users.

In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users.

They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.

For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design.

Examples

Various examples from the World Wide Web:

Usability.gov

Source:

The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference.

These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and web analytics.

Your personas are only as good as the research behind them.

Effective personas

Represent a major user group for your website

Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user groups

Give a clear picture of the user's expectations and how they're likely to use the site

Aid in uncovering universal features and functionality

Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values

Benefits of Personas

Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation.

They also offer a quick and inexpensive way to test and prioritize those features throughout the development process.

In addition they can help:

Stakeholders and leaders evaluate new site feature ideas

Information architects develop informed wireframes, interface behaviors, and labeling

Designers create the overall look and feel of the website

System engineers/developers decide which approaches to take based on user behaviors

Copy writers ensure site content is written to the appropriate audiences

Best Practices for Developing Personas

Personas development belongs at the beginning of the project, as personas can inform site functionality, help uncover gaps, or highlight new opportunities.

You may develop one or more personas for a project but limit yourself to the main audiences for the site.

For any given project, creating only three or four personas is best.

Remember that it is better to paint with a broad brush and meet the needs of the larger populations than try to meet the needs of everyone.

The goal of personas is not represent all audiences or address all needs of the website but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups.

To ensure your personas are accurate representations of your users and have the support of your stakeholders throughout the process, you should:

Conduct user research: Answer the following questions:

  • Who are your users and why are they using the system?
  • What behaviors, assumptions, and expectations color their view of the system?

Condense the research:

  • Look for themes/characteristics that are specific, relevant, and universal to the system and its users.

Brainstorm:

  • Organize elements into persona groups that represent your target users. Name or classify each group.

Refine:

  • Combine and prioritize the rough personas. Separate them into primary, secondary, and, if necessary, complementary categories.
  • You should have roughly 3-5 personas and their identified characteristics.

Make them realistic:

  • Develop the appropriate descriptions of each personas background, motivations, and expectations.
  • Do not include a lot of personal information.
  • Be relevant and serious; humor is not appropriate.

Smashing Magazine

A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 1)

Source:

What Is a Persona?

A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way.

A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real individual; rather, it is synthesized from observations of many people.

Each persona represents a significant portion of people in the real world and enables the designer to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters, instead of focusing on thousands of individuals.

Personas aid designers to create different designs for different kinds of people and to design for a specific somebody, rather than a generic everybody.

What Does A Persona Look Like?

While a persona is usually presented as a one-pager document, it is more than just a deliverable.

It is a way to communicate and summarize research trends and patterns to others.

This fundamental understanding of users is what’s important, not the document itself.

Where Does The Concept Of Personas Come From?

Understanding the historical context and what personas meant to their progenitor will help us understand what personas can mean to us designers.

Personas were informally developed by Alan Cooper in the early ’80s as a way to empathize with and internalize the mindset of people who would eventually use the software he was designing.

Alan Cooper interviewed several people among the intended audience of a project he was working on and got to know them so well that he pretended to be them as a way of brainstorming and evaluating ideas from their perspective.

This method-acting technique allowed Cooper to put users front and center in the design process as he created software.

As Cooper moved from creating software himself to consulting, he quickly discovered that, to be successful, he needed a way to help clients see the world from his perspective, which was informed directly by a sample set of intended users.

This need to inform and persuade clients led him to formalize personas into a concrete deliverable that communicates one’s user-centered knowledge to those who did not do the research themselves.

Since its humble origin, Alan Cooper’s design methodology has evolved into a subset of user-centered design, which he has branded goal-directed design.

Goal-directed design combines new and old methodologies from ethnography, market research and strategic planning, among other fields, in a way to simultaneously address business needs, technological requirements (and limitations) and user goals.

Personas are a core component of goal-directed design.

Components of Goal-Directed Design that Suppport Personas

End goal(s) - This is an objective that a persona wants or needs to fulfill by using software. The software would aid the persona to accomplish their end goal(s) by enabling them to accomplish their tasks via certain features.

Scenario(s) - This is a narrative that describes how a persona would interact with software in a particular context to achieve their end goal(s).

Scenarios are written from the persona’s perspective, at a high level, and articulate use cases that will likely happen in the future.

How Are Personas Created?

Personas can be created in a myriad of ways, but designers are recommended to follow this general formula:

Interview and/or observe an adequate number of people.

Find patterns in the interviewees’ responses and actions, and use those to group similar people together.

Create archetypical models of those groups, based on the patterns found.

Drawing from that understanding of users and the model of that understanding, create user-centered designs.

Share those models with other team members and stakeholders.

What Are Personas Used For?

  • Build empathy
  • Develop focus
  • Communicate and form consensus
  • Make and defend decisions
  • Measure effectiveness

How And Why Do Personas Work?

Personas are effective because they leverage and stimulate several innate human abilities:

  • Narrative practice
  • Long-term memory
  • Concrete thinking
  • Theory of mind (folk psychology)
  • Empathy
  • Experience-taking

Do I Really Need to Use Personas?

Usually ... designers design for people unlike themselves, in which case getting to know as much as possible about the users by using personas is recommended.

Personas help to prevent self-referential thinking, whereby a designer designs as if they are making the software only for themselves, when in fact the audience is quite unlike them.

Persona Template by Christof Zürn

Source:


See Also

External Links

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